Shag Harbour UFO Incident

The night

Just before midnight on October 4, 1967, people around Shag Harbour reported a low object with lights coming down toward the water a short way offshore. One of the first calls to the RCMP came from Laurie Wickens, who was 17. His family says the officer who answered asked whether he had been drinking, before more calls came in. A corporal and two constables from the Barrington Passage detachment reached the shore in time to see a light on the water, which stayed visible for about 5 more minutes.

The first reports were of a plane going into the sea, and it was handled that way. Fishing boats and a Coast Guard boat went out and found patches of foam 30 to 40 yards wide. Later accounts from people on the boats describe the foam as thick and yellow; the 1967 documents give no color. No aircraft was missing, and a nearby RCAF radar station reported no air operations and no unusual radar contact.

The memo

A Department of National Defence memo dated October 6, 1967, and signed by Colonel W. W. Turner, Director of Operations, is headed "UFO REPORT / LOWER WOOD HARBOUR NS," after the neighboring village. It gives the time as 2345 hours and describes "four white lights" on an object "in excess of 60 feet in diameter" that "flew down to the water surface, floated and sank." It says the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax "discounted the possibilities that the sighting was produced by an aircraft, flares, floats, or any other known objects."

Maritime Command was asked to investigate on October 5. The memo reports an officer and "a diving team of three men" on the scene, "aided by Coast Guard Cutter 101." A later Defence memo says the divers "failed to locate any tangible evidence which could be used to arrive at an explainable conclusion." The search was called off within about 5 days.

The file

Library and Archives Canada holds the Defence file: RG 24, accession 83-84/167, box 7523, file DRBS 3800-10-1, part 1. The archive's own account of the case says it is thin: "There is no trace of the RCMP reports of this sighting in the files... the only documentation that exists in the files is a DND memo." It adds that Defence "identified this sighting as unsolved." Researchers have since published other documents, including RCMP telexes and a rescue center report form, that the archive's account of this file does not include.

Beyond the file

In 2001, the researchers Don Ledger and Chris Styles published Dark Object. It argues that the object moved underwater to a submarine-detection station at Government Point near Shelburne, where divers saw it on the seabed. Those accounts come from interviews that began in 1993, mostly with people identified only by first names or pseudonyms, and no government document supporting them has surfaced. The station was real: a US Navy listening facility that operated at Government Point from 1955 to 1994.

The book's subtitle calls Shag Harbour "the world's only government-documented UFO crash." The documents record a report, a search, and no explanation. They do not record a crash or a craft.

A University of Colorado study of UFO reports, run under a US Air Force contract, looked at the case by telephone in 1968. Its summary: "Apparently no one actually saw anything enter the water."

The village

The Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society runs an interpretive center on Highway 3. Wickens helped found the Society and became its president. He died on July 19, 2026, at 76. The Society canceled this year's Shag Harbour UFO XPO, planned for October 2 to 4 in Yarmouth, and its notice ends: "Hope to see you for our 60th anniversary in 2027."

The Society lists the interpretive center as open from June 15 to October 4, 10am to 5pm, with $5 admission. Tourism Nova Scotia gives September 30 as the last day of the season, so it's worth calling ahead late in the year (902-723-2293). The collection is press coverage, television documentaries, memorabilia, and witness accounts rather than physical evidence, and most visitors spend about 30 minutes there.

The reported entry point is offshore, about 200 to 300 yards out, and nothing marks it on the water. A gazebo and picnic site about 3 minutes up the road from the center has the clearest view of it.